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Mark Jacobs has published more than 90 stories in a range of magazines including The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Southern Humanities Review.

His five books include three novels and two collections of short stories. Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction Robert Olen Butler wrote that “Mark Jacobs is one of the most exciting new writers I’ve read in years…. a writer who I think will become our own Graham Greene.”

Stone Cowboy

“Every once in a while, when you least expect it, you stumble across a novel that reminds you of fiction’s capacity to delight and amaze.” - Washington Post

“Jacobs elegantly blends the stories of Latin American revolutionaries, drug csars, thugs, expatriates, and lost souls. His eerie and engrossing tale recalls the magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with a cynical American edge of its own. An enchanting debut.” - Penthouse

“An impressive debut from a writer with a generous imagination and a daring, if deeply weird, sense of character and fate.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Jacobs makes the familiar unique with a magic realism that owes more to Carlos Castañeda than Garcia Marquez.” – Salon.com

“Essential reading for anyone attempting to understand the human side of our drug polices... a multilayered tale of spiritual renewal.” -- Library Journal

“Jacobs breathes new life into the old form with lucid, sinewy prose and an intimate knowledge of the Bolivian people and landscape.” -- Publishers Weekly

“Stone Cowboy is the ugliest, most depressing book you will ever love, a travel journal from hell. Part crime thriller, part travel guide, part sociological treatise, Stone Cowboy makes for one ugly, entertaining and profound read.” - San Antonio Express News

The Liberation of Little Heaven

“Through the wide range of vital themes in this collection and the convincing portraits and tales of his characters, Jacobs includes us in his visions, often bringing them fearfully close.” - The Boston Book Review

“It took me by surprise within a page.” - Men’s Journal

“… these sensitive insider’s stories give a vivid glimpse of a country that may always come across as foreign.” - Kirkus Review

“His work has been likened to that of Graham Greene and Robert Stone… At his best moments, he lives up to the distinguished comparisons.” Time Out New York

A Handful of Kings

“If John LeCarré were an American, his name would be Mark Jacobs.” - Kinky Friedman

“No writer is as brilliant as Mark Jacobs at exploring the rich fictional realm of the American abroad. He blends the literary traditions of Henry James and Graham Greene in work that is truly his own and truly wonderful. A Handful of Kings is his best book yet. – Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction

A Cast of Spaniards

“Mark Jacobs writes of that ‘south of the border’ which rarely if ever surfaces in the daily news reports. His wryly perceptive tales prove an extraordinary record of common lives in a world our own barely recognizes. The author’s voice may be ‘American’ but what it speaks of, and the place it comes from, prove adamantly universaly. Mr. Jacobs tells the old truths in the classic manner, with consummate skill and integrity.” - Robert Creeley (1926 – 2005)

“Mark Jacobs deserves a large and attentive readership. His tales of violence and desire, of Americans colliding with Latin American revolutionaries, romantics, thugs, and ordinary folk, make diverting and disturbing reading. His collection is a remarkable debut of an accomplished, passionate, politcally astute new writer.” - C. Michael Curtis, Senior Editor, The Atlantic

“In powerful language Jacobs twists the reader’s point-of-view, forcing one to see the land through its people but also to understand how attachment to the land influences actions… It’s rare that a collection of short stories is so consistent, but Jacobs’ exquisite craftsmanship never wavers.” -- Publishers Weekly

“North American writers have evolved a tradition of writing about their compatriots who travel to Latin America to fill in the emptiness of their lives. Jacobs, a diplomat who has spent much of his life in the countries in which these stories are set, confronts that tradition head on… The stories are engaging and smart.” -- Library Journal

“I found the stories in Mark Jacobs’ recently published collection, A Cast of Spaniards, to be quite splendid… Mark Jacobs’ stories burn too, and paradoxically, give Latin America not only new life but, for me, an old life it didn’t have before.” -- Richard Wiley, RPCV Readers and Writers

“From his considerable experience in various Latin American countries, Jacobs sees beyond cultural facades. Is he a US or Latin American writer? There is no partiality in his writing that would give this away… Jacobs obliterates distinctions between message and character. For him, the most intimate love making cannot be separated from politics, nor the most dogged political convictions from the depths of human character…. There is a remarkable story called “Black Moon Rising,” set mainly in La Paz, that would make an ideal film. In 31 pages, Jacobs manages to cover the intimate relationship between American journalist, Laurel, and Bolivian revolutionary, Victor Meson, with innuendoes of recent Bolivian history. Meson carries out his mission fervently, gathering evidence of human rights violations, but is considered a traitor by his former comrade, Julio, who has joined a group akin to the Shining Path of Peru that gets its money from the sale of cocaine paste… This story could be Jacobs’ “Sierre Madre” movie made in Hollywood, or his “Macario” made in Bolivia, but more likely the latter… Like an underground spring, a dark humor occasionally rises to the surface, most notably in “Sixto in Harvest,” a rural comedy whose thin humor has affinities with Garcia Marquez and Erskine Caldwell alike.” – Mark Cramer in Bolivian Times

“To simply say that Mark Jacobs’ stories are set in modern-day South America is accurate but profoundly misleading. Their true setting is some shadowy region of the imagination that Jacobs shares with his readers – a region where colors and sounds and other sensations take on a garish lucidity, a place where hidden meanings lurk beneath objects and people imply more than they speak aloud.” Ted Knight in Buffalo Spree Magazine

“It puts me in mind of other firsts: A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist, A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor. The book jacket tells us that Mark Jacobs has served as a diplomat in Latin America. I don’t know what kind of diplomat Jacobs is or was. I do knew he has made a good start as a writer. A Cast of Spaniards is that greatest of pleasures, a good read. – John Little, North Dakota Review